What is Sales Enablement? A modern playbook for GTM teams

Sales enablement was supposed to make selling easier.

But if you ask today’s enablement leaders, they’ll tell you their time is spent:

• Re-sending reps the latest pitch deck
• Building training programs that reps forget a month into the job
• Trying to get sales managers to actually coach, while knowing that most don’t
• Creating content that disappears into the void, unsure if reps ever use it

Somewhere between cranking out content, scrambling to onboard new reps, and chasing down the latest product messaging, sales enablement strayed from its purpose—and became a never-ending grind. 

What was meant to empower sellers has turned into an endless to-do list that’s more about checking boxes than driving real results.

But done right, sales enablement can make the entire revenue team sharper, more strategic, and tightly aligned to pipeline and revenue.

Keep reading for a breakdown of the modern sales enablement playbook, from how to standardize processes to tips for reinforcing training inside real deals and proving the value of enablement as a growth engine—not a support function.

What is sales enablement?

‍Sales enablement is a holistic system of research, processes, training, content, and tools that provides salespeople and revenue-generating teams with the support they need to close deals consistently. 

The goal of sales enablement is to simplify the complicated web of:

• Who your customers are and what they care about
• What your products do
• How you’re different from competitors
• What tools and workflows support the sales process
• What content your sales team needs to sell
• How to deliver timely, relevant content to your sales team and potential customers

Sales enablement is needed most often in complex selling and buying scenarios—typically larger-value B2B deals with lots of moving parts.

The impact of sales enablement: Why it matters

A well-executed sales enablement strategy directly impacts revenue by reducing time-to-ramp for new reps, increasing deal velocity, and improving win rates. 

Businesses with strong sales enablement functions typically see:

• Improved close rates, retention rates, and rep retention: One of the most critical aspects of sales enablement is supporting growth and sales readiness across your team. The best sales enablement programs equip sellers with the tools, data, and content they need to not just close more deals but also become active contributors to the company's long-term vision and revenue growth.
• Improved cross-functional alignment: When Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product work together, it helps align sales reps with the latest product insights, buyer feedback, and messaging. This cohesion both improves deal quality and enables scalability. The result? More efficient sales cycles, higher close rates, and a more agile revenue organization that can quickly adapt to changing buyer needs.
• Smoother product rollouts: Successful product rollouts hinge on more than just a great product—they require an ongoing, strategic enablement approach that equips your sellers to position, sell, and deliver value from day one. A good sales enablement program ensures your reps have easy access to the most up-to-date resources for new products—from product positioning documents and pitch decks to case studies. This minimizes delays, reduces friction, and prepares reps to handle buyer questions and objections with the most relevant and current information. 

Who is responsible for sales enablement?

Sales enablement can be a job, team, or distributed function across an organization.

In the absence of a Sales Enablement team, Product Marketing should be the main driver of your sales enablement strategy, as they’re already responsible for customer research, messaging, and product content.

But there are different models for who owns sales enablement depending on the stage and size of your company:

• At early-stage startups, sales enablement is a shared responsibility across your early cross-functional revenue teams (e.g. your Founder, Sales, Marketing, and RevOps).
• In the next phase, it’s typical that Product Marketing owns sales enablement.
• Once a sales team’s growth hits a certain tipping point, they hire a dedicated Sales Enablement Manager.
• From there, the single sales enablement role expands into a full-fledged Sales Enablement team.

:::callout [📘 Who should own sales enablement?], [For a deeper dive into this question, check out our article on Who Owns Sales Enablement?] :::

How is sales enablement changing?

Buyers today spend less time with sales reps and more time researching on their own. B2B buyers spend only 17% of the total purchase journey with sales reps, and 44% of millennials prefer no sales rep interaction at all in a B2B setting. 

In other words, sales enablement is changing. Fast. 

Here are just some of the key ways sales enablement is evolving to meet the demands of buyers and decision-makers today:

1. Buyers expect more agency

It's not just about enabling your sellers anymore. With 75% of buyers preferring a rep-free sales experience, businesses have to pivot and provide buyers with the right content and tools to self-educate and move through the customer journey on their own terms.

Sales enablement is becoming buyer enablement.

2. Every team is a revenue team

Another closely related shift in sales enablement? Today’s B2B buying journey is no longer linear. 

Buyers often engage with multiple teams like Customer Success, Product Marketing, or even Support—sometimes before ever speaking to Sales. This means every team is a revenue team. 

Without a unified enablement strategy, teams work in silos, leading to inconsistent messaging, misaligned priorities, and lost revenue opportunities.

3. Tech stacks have flattened

Sales enablement platforms and traditional LMSs are typically built for sellers. But these tools aren’t prospect-facing and can’t support buyer or revenue enablement effectively—and often, they don’t even make it easy for sellers to quickly find the assets they need.

“The reality is, most salespeople use maybe 10 slides during a sales cycle. Do they actually need the 100-slide deck repository?” says Lish Barber, Director of Enablement at Sigma Computing.

Truly effective enablement solutions should support a revenue-wide strategy and align every team working with your buyers.

4. AI is powering enablement in new ways

Even though the most popular use cases for AI in sales enablement so far are for generating content (like emails and outreach messaging), this barely scratches the surface. 

Tools like Gong and Dialpad Sell can analyze sales calls to highlight details like prospects’ pain points and objections, while Dock’s AI widget can generate business cases and meeting recaps with call transcripts and instantly add them to a digital sales room.

:::callout [📘 What's the future of sales enablement?],[Check out our article on the latest sales enablement trends.]:::

What does sales enablement look like in practice?

Here’s a quick breakdown of the five pillars of sales enablement.

1. Research

Research is the starting point of any sales enablement strategy. Sales enablement asks: 

• Who are your customers? Identify the top customer profiles that sales teams can readily understand and use. You don't need every potential buyer persona. Focus on the ones with the most potential to convert. Customer personas will change as the marketplace morphs over time—always keep them in mind and tweak as you go.
• Where are your customers? Marketing teams will have a great sense of where those top customer personas tend to be, as well as their interests. Sharing this knowledge between Marketing and Sales is essential.
• What's the market doing? Customer behaviors shift and new competitors constantly emerge over time. The marketplace is always changing, which is why research is critical to sales enablement.

2. Processes

The goal of sales enablement is to streamline the sales effort and the buyer experience—not to complicate it. Systems and processes are critical to that success. 

Two examples of sales enablement processes are:

• Content delivery. Everyone who touches sales enablement (Product Marketing, Sales, designers, copywriters, etc.) needs to know the steps for approving materials, deliverable timelines, who owns what, and where to find content.
• Sales training. Sales teams should know to expect training at key points (e.g., after a product update), and Product Marketing should plan the training content and host sessions

3. Training

Sales teams have to understand the product well to sell it. The Sales Enablement and/or Product Marketing teams should run ongoing sales and product training.

For example, you should host a training session every time you launch a new product or feature. There should also be regular training or office hours on competitors' products, changes in the market, or new ICPs.

4. Content

Creating and distributing content is a big component of sales enablement. There are two sides to sales enablement content:

There’s internal-facing sales enablement content, such as:

• Messaging briefs
• Internal training decks
• Competitor battle cards
• Pricing sheets

And then there’s the client-facing sales content, such as:

• Product one-sheeters
• Pitch decks
• White papers
• ROI case studies and interactive calculators
• Customer testimonials and stories
• Press kits, and more

5. Tools

Finally, sales enablement is about using tools to deliver content and training to Sales. These tools typically include:

• Revenue intelligence tools
• Learning management systems
• Content production tools
• Content management systems
• Buyer enablement tools

Sales enablement best practices & strategy

Building a scalable sales enablement function requires a mix of strategy, execution, and iteration. Here are ten best practices to optimize your sales enablement efforts:

1. Align enablement with business goals

The end goal of enablement isn’t just training—it’s about driving revenue. For sales enablement teams to justify their own existence, they have to prove their own ROI.

Define clear goals that align with business priorities, such as:

• reducing ramp time for new hires,
• increasing conversion rates, or 
• improving forecast accuracy.

To ensure cross-team alignment, collaborate closely with sales leaders, RevOps, and other GTM team members to identify the key metrics and KPIs that matter most. Regularly track and analyze these metrics—whether it’s shortening the time it takes for new reps to hit quota, improving deal velocity, or increasing the effectiveness of sales conversations.

2. Avoid falling into the perfectionism trap

Striving for perfection in sales enablement can end up slowing you down and leading to missed opportunities—especially when you’re trying to scale quickly. 

“Start little by little,” says Lish Barber. “What's the most important thing they need to know on week one? They need to know why they joined the company, what the problem is that you're solving, and who cares about that problem.”

An iterative approach is often more effective than a rigid, over-engineered program. Instead of waiting until every resource is perfectly polished, prioritize getting essential information into your reps' hands quickly. 

“People don't need to learn about building a quote in the first two weeks, right? Building a quote could probably just be like a list of instructions: ‘Click here, then click here’... And so a lot of what I looked at when we're building onboarding programs is what do I have to push, and what can be a “pull” resource that [sellers] just need to know exists?”

Enablement should be a dynamic, evolving process driven by continuous improvement. By prioritizing progress over perfection, you can build an agile and responsive strategy that constantly refines itself based on feedback and performance data.

3. Match content to each stage of the buyer journey

The best sales enablement content strategy isn’t about volume of assets—it’s about relevance.

Reps don’t need another folder full of pitch decks. They need clear, timely assets that match the buyer’s mindset at each stage of the deal. That means content should be mapped not just to funnel stages, but also to the real conversations your sellers are having.

This, again, starts with collaboration. Talk to your sales team regularly. Ask what they wish they had on hand when a buyer brings up budget, security, or their biggest competitor. Watch sales calls to hear the objections firsthand. Review deal notes and Gong transcripts. Then build content that reflects the actual friction points in your sales process.

You’ll end up with a content strategy that looks more like a deal map than a marketing plan. For example:

• Awareness-stage buyers need content that frames the problem and your unique POV—think one-pagers, explainer videos, and blog posts your reps can share after cold outreach.
• Consideration-stage buyers are evaluating options. That’s where your competitor comparisons, sales decks, and case studies should come into play.
• Decision-stage buyers want proof. ROI calculators, implementation timelines, pricing breakdowns, and security documentation will help your champion sell the deal internally.

Once you have the right content, structure it so it’s easy to find. 

Build a taxonomy in your sales content management system based on sales stage, persona, product line, and use case. Tag assets clearly. Create a source of truth—not just for reps to pull from, but for your enablement team to track what’s working (and what’s collecting dust).

Dock can help here. 

Dock’s content management system gives your enablement and marketing teams a centralized way to organize sales content by stage, persona, or product. 

You can tag and categorize assets so reps can quickly surface the right deck, battle card, or ROI calculator—without having to dig through Slack threads or shared drives. And because everything’s shareable externally, you can instantly turn those assets into client-facing deliverables.

You also get content engagement analytics—so instead of guessing which case studies or one-pagers move deals forward, you’ll know.

This is where content strategy meets sales strategy. Your goal isn’t just to make content—it’s to remove friction from the buying process.

4. Make enablement proactive, not reactive

Many enablement teams operate in reactive mode—responding to fire drills and requests from other teams rather than coming to the table with a strategy and driving long-term change. 

“While I want to listen to what [stakeholders] are hearing, I also want to come with insights,” says Barber. “If you’re just coming to them with, ‘How can we help, how can we help?’, you become the cleanup crew. You become the order taker. You don't become the strategic partner.”

5. Enable sales managers to coach effectively

Remember: Sales Enablement isn’t the only function responsible for sales training. Sales managers should be the most significant lever for rep performance. 

But to maximize impact, sales managers need more than just general coaching skills—they need a clear framework for reinforcing enablement initiatives in day-to-day interactions. 

Equip them with structured sales coaching guides, call review templates, and data-driven insights that help them diagnose performance gaps in how reps are leveraging content and delivering their pitches. This will help them tailor their coaching to individual reps. 

6. Leverage AI and automation

From analyzing sales calls to suggesting content to automating follow-ups, AI-powered sales enablement tools can provide a sales productivity boost in multiple ways. And beyond just efficiency, AI can also provide conversational insights and deeper visibility into sales performance. 

This is all great for sales enablement teams because it allows them to go from just guessing what works to knowing based on data. 

For example, instead of relying on anecdotal feedback, enablement teams can use AI-driven insights to identify patterns in winning sales content, pinpoint skill gaps, and refine training programs accordingly. 

7. Align cross-functional roadmaps for smoother execution

Effective sales enablement requires not only marketing alignment, but also close collaboration with Product and Customer Success teams. Having a cross-functional roadmap makes sure everyone is aligned on goals, timelines, and deliverables.

“Whether it's a problem we're solving that's being driven from sales leadership that might need PMM support, or Product is launching a new thing that's going to need sales enablement support, our roadmaps overlap,” says Barber. “If we are aligned on what we're trying to achieve, we can share the work.”

8. Scale content delivery with sales deal rooms

Even the best sales content won’t make an impact if it’s stuck in someone’s Google Drive or buried in an internal wiki.

Reps shouldn’t have to waste time piecing together follow-up emails or attaching the same documents over and over. And buyers definitely shouldn’t have to dig through their inbox to find a pricing sheet or case study they saw two weeks ago.

That’s why repeatable content delivery is just as important as content creation.

Sales rooms—like Dock—give reps a fast, consistent way to share all the right resources at the right time, without starting from scratch. Instead of sending one-off emails with a trail of attachments, reps can spin up a personalized, trackable workspace with a few clicks.

Each room is built around a pre-approved template created by your enablement team: demo videos, sales decks, ROI calculators, price quotes, security docs, mutual action plans—it’s all in one place, and it’s customizable for each deal.

More importantly, these rooms don’t just streamline rep workflows—they make life easier for buyers, too. Everything they need to make a decision is packaged together in a clean, shareable link they can pass to their internal stakeholders. That makes it easier for champions to champion.

And because Dock integrates with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, you can push buyer engagement data directly into your pipeline. Reps can see who’s viewed what content alongside deal stage, next steps, and forecast notes—all in one place. That means less toggling between tools and more visibility into what’s actually influencing revenue.

This is how you scale sales enablement beyond just content creation. When every rep is delivering polished, consistent follow-up—and every buyer has a clear path forward—you create a repeatable sales motion that actually grows with your team.

And for fast-growing sales teams, the pre-built structure helps speed up onboarding and ramp-up times, and provides more scalability and flexibility.

9. Measure, iterate, and improve

Enablement requires continuous monitoring and adaptation. By regularly tracking key metrics like content adoption rates, deal velocity, and quota attainment, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and make data-driven adjustments to your enablement and sales strategy. 

For example, if certain content isn't being used or isn’t leading to higher close rates, it might be time to revisit whether it’s relevant and how it’s being delivered.

10. Invest in scalable systems

To manage growing sales enablement needs, implement a centralized enablement content management system that can organize, tag, and surface the most relevant materials based on sales stages or buyer personas. 

As your team expands, these tools become even more valuable because they can automate content distribution and give reps the right resources at their fingertips, when they need them. 

The 3 stages of sales enablement content

Content plays a crucial role in executing a successful sales enablement strategy. Now that we’ve covered the key pillars and best practices, let's drill down into what effective sales enablement content strategy looks like at different phases of the sales cycle.

1. Awareness

Top-of-funnel awareness content is typically used more for lead generation than sales, but it can still bring educational value to the buyer at the beginning of the sales process. This includes content such as:

• Product or service website pages
• Blog posts
• Social media content
• Email campaigns
• Webinars

For example, your Sales team can share thought leadership blog posts or LinkedIn posts from your CEO with prospects to establish your company as an authority in your industry.

2. Consideration

The consideration phase is where the sales cycle truly starts. The sales rep typically delivers this content alongside or just after a product demo or discovery call.

A buyer will often share or forward these materials to other stakeholders within their company. So, any piece of consideration content should be able to stand on its own.

Consideration content includes:

• Product demo videos and explainers
• Pitch decks
• Sales proposals
• Pricing quotes
• Product PDFs like one-pagers and datasheets
• Customer case studies
• Buyer enablement guides or checklists

3. Decision

At this point, buyers are looking for technical details or proof of ROI to make their decision. This content looks like:

• Mutual action plans
• Personalized demo recordings
• Solution architecture information
• Security, privacy, and other technical information for security reviews
• Competitor comparisons
• ROI case studies (like a Forrester report)

How to measure sales enablement

There are countless sales enablement metrics you can track, but that doesn’t mean you should track all of them.

Not every metric is relevant to every sales organization. Your industry, company size, ACV, and other factors all influence what successful sales enablement looks like, and which specific metrics are actually relevant to your business.

When it comes to sales enablement, there are three general categories of metrics:

1. Sales performance metrics, which tie your broader enablement efforts to overall sales team results. Think deal size, win rates, quota attainment, and revenue influenced by marketing events and campaigns.
2. Rep-level performance metrics, which narrow things down to content usage rates by rep, product knowledge, who your top performers are, and ramp times for new hires.
3. Content metrics, which show how the sales enablement assets themselves are performing. These include metrics like views, downloads, and completion rates for sales collateral.

:::callout [📈 Want more tips on measuring sales enablement?], [Check out this article on sales enablement metrics.]:::

Sales enablement tools and software

Sales enablement is still maturing as a field, so the tools on the market are still catching up to the needs of Revenue teams.

Here’s a quick review of the sales enablement software landscape. 

The old guard: LMSs and CMSs

Traditional sales enablement technology used to be about two things: sales training and content management.

Highspot, Seismic, and Showpad—the three most popular legacy platforms—are part LMS and part CMS.

They offer learning management systems (LMS) for building courses for sales teams to help them learn about the products or services that they're selling.

These LMSs have wiki functionality to create an internal "library" resource—which is great in theory, but it’s often disconnected from a company-wide wiki, creating silos between Sales and the rest of the organization. 

So most companies ditch them in favor of a company-wide LMS, which isn’t created specifically for the needs of Sales and Revenue teams.

These tools also come with a sales content management system (CMS) that acts as a repository for sales enablement content. 

Marketing typically uploads content to the sales CMS and then Sales teams pull content as needed.

But here’s the big challenge with these tools: 

They make it difficult for sellers to find the most up-to-date content. Plus, Product Marketing doesn’t know when and if content is being used in the sales cycle, or for which customer profile—which means both sides are in the dark.

Newer versions of these tools have emerged to partially solve these challenges.

• For learning management, Workramp is a newer sales training tool that lets you create sales onboarding boot camps, training programs, and learning centers.
• For knowledge management, Guru is a popular choice, as its boards and collections make it more searchable than other tools.

But while these may have interesting features, they’re often still not great prospect-facing solutions.

The new challenger: Revenue enablement software

Dock is a new type of revenue enablement software that’s designed to address the shortcomings of traditional sales enablement solutions. 

While most legacy sales enablement tools focus on just internal training (as LMSs) and content management, Dock combines two key elements that truly help sellers do their jobs more effectively:

• Collaboration across revenue teams (between Sales, Marketing, RevOps, and Customer Success)
• Collaboration between sellers and buyers (to simplify the buying process)

Don’t get us wrong. Dock excels at enabling sales teams. But because it also enables the entire revenue team to work as a cohesive unit, we think of it as a revenue enablement platform. 

For example, Dock’s content management platform makes it easy for the Sales team to discover and share content that Marketing created—without needing internal wikis or messy Google Drive folders.

Anything uploaded to a Dock content library can be shared directly with clients as a link (rather than an email attachment). 

Or, you can share assets like quotes and order forms, security profiles, and mutual action plans through a Dock digital sales room. Any type of content can be embedded, including PDFs, videos, spreadsheets, project plans, task lists, and more.

This gives sales reps one place to share content with prospects instead of cluttering their inboxes with lots of attachments and email threads.

But Dock isn’t just for external follow-up.

You can also build internal workspaces built specifically for internal enablement—so you can deliver onboarding, product training, and GTM enablement in the same clean, organized format your sales team already uses with buyers. No more Confluence clutter or LMS sprawl.

Now, whether you’re launching a new product, onboarding a new hire, or updating messaging across the org, Dock gives enablement teams one system to deliver repeatable training, content, and messaging across the entire revenue org—without juggling three different tools.

You can create internal workspaces for:

• New hire onboarding for AEs, SDRs, or CSMs
• Product launch playbooks with messaging, assets, and training
• Competitive landscape hubs with battle cards and objection handling guides
• Sales methodology refreshes or certification tracks
• Customer Success enablement (e.g., rollout guides, health score playbooks)
• GTM alignment plans for cross-functional campaigns
• Quarterly enablement updates or roadmap briefings
• Live training follow-up hubs with session recordings and next steps

:::callout [👀 Compare the top sales enablement platforms], [Get a closer look at Highspot vs. Seismic vs. Showpad vs. Dock.]:::

Level up your sales enablement with Dock

Sales enablement is a journey, not a destination. It's an ongoing process of improvement that requires regular attention and care. 

More importantly, it’s an opportunity to align not Sales, but every team around common revenue goals. The more you invest in removing silos between your revenue teams, systems, and technology, the more you enable your teams to succeed.

Enable your entire Revenue team with Dock. Try it for free.